I feel like before AI, being a software engineer was highly respected.

Everyone who had ever touched coding before, whether that be as a proxy from majoring in another STEM (chem, bio,..), engineering, or even to some extent social sciences (maybe they touched a bit of R-programming or whatever).

Everyone internally (in their heads) kinda knew that to be a really good software engineer you had to be cut from a different cloth. You needed a ton of dedication, passion, and interest. Tons of those people majoring in other stuff, completely gave up after 1 semester of coding; realizing they couldn't do it. Everyone knew that it was hard.

Nowadays, everyone think of software engineers as pure vibe-coders /AI slop that everyone can do. A friend of mine told me at their company they just hired a new guy as a sole developer. He's now vibe coding everything (complete systems), datawarehouses, etc, only having a little experience with python in school.